Good luck in your endeavors...
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| Learning the Art of Unfocusing | ||||||||
| One of the initial and usually most difficult things to learn in meditation is how to switch from (what I like to refer to as) a "physical consciousness" to a "spiritual consciousness". There are many ways to do this and there are many different opinions on what is the best way to learn this. My hope is that in teaching the way I learned and honed this skill, it will help those from a novice to an advanced level gain and hone their own abilities to focus and hyperfocus through unfocusing. (wow! That sounds confusing!) It's really not that hard to understand. First, I'm going to explain what it start as so that there is a frame of reference. Do you know that feeling that you get when you daydream? Even more accurately, do you remember exactly what happens and what it feels like when you slip from complete physical consciousness into that daydream? That experience has extremely similar characteristics to the skills used to get into an initial meditative state. In fact, this same technique can be honed into the abilitly to get into deeper meditative states much more quickly and precisely. Let's start by having a way to practice and guage your own experience and success. I suggest initially practicing this in front of a TV or computer monitor in a very quiet and calm environment. Get in a comfortable position that takes very little effort to maintain. Start by looking in the middle of the screen and letting your eyes relax but keeping them comfortably open. Don't focus on the center of the screen but rather relax your vision towards the center so that your peripheral vision starts to blur. If you delve into this effect more the edges of your vision will turn from blurred to dark and that will begin to overtake your vision until in completely fades to black. If at any point you begin to pay too much attention, your eyes will naturally focus and you will jump right back to normal vision. Don't worry and don't be frustrated. Just take a break and relax for a few minutes and try again. It may take some time to master this ability, but it's the natural progression of what happens to your vision when you day dream. By learning to "tune out" your vision you effectively heighten the awareness of your other senses. Learning to do this with your vision is just the start. The next step is to learn how to tune out your auditory sense (hearing). I suggest learning this by using some soft ambient music in the background. Don't use anything that requires concentration to hear. Once you can comfortably and consistantly tune out your vision, practice doing your vision and then your hearing. Once you can do that, practice doing them both at the same time. You will see some of the side effects of this ability are to be able to tune into other senses more deeply and accurately, to have a heightened spiritual sense of the self, and to have a calmer harmony with the inner self and the world throughout. Good luck in your endeavors... |
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